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Commentary
GENERATION NEXT: Millennials are hungry for intimacy with God Zoe Miles, Feb 25, 2010
Zoe Miles
By Zoe Miles Special Contributor
I am a husband hunter. Whenever appealing prey enters my crosshairs, a scrolling checklist is triggered: No wedding ring. Potentially loves Jesus. Probably studying to be a surgeon to support my career as a struggling artist . . .
All too often, though, we fail to make eye contact, the three-second drama curtains and I return to the task before me.
My knees are prepped to buckle at the witty quips of the man fashioned to love my long locks. We’ll dance to James Taylor’s “How Sweet It Is” as Abba-God pats himself on the back for doing such a good job.
God reserves many brothers and sisters exclusively for himself to interweave his Spirit with their own, a connection that our other Jesus siblings obtain with the Lord in marriage. When the Lord desires that we “may know and believe [him]” (Isaiah 43:10) the writer uses the Hebrew word for know, yadha, to paint the familiarity between a husband and a wife.
For those in the Body called to marriage, the covenant is designed to reach the marrow of union, providing a rain-puddle picture of the intimacy ocean in which God desires to swim with each individual.
Poor marriage models
As marriages corrode in our society, however, these reflecting pools are rare. Many of my Generation Y fellows watched their Baby Boomer parents’ rainwater puddles become muddy, grow hard and crack in the desert sun.
Rather than James Taylor, John Prine’s “Angel From Montgomery” simmers on the heat waves: “How does a person go to work in the morning, come home in the evening and have nothing to say?”
God designed marriage to quench the thirst for earthly interconnection. Generation Y is parched, and our parents’ cracked marriages a hope of no relief. This results in a distrust of the marital institution.
Just as the emerging generation quests for the waters of earthly intimacy, we also seek to satisfy the innate desire to find God.
Lane, a 20-year-old Texan, strives to follow “the teachings and values set forth by Jesus Christ, [as] the forerunner in peaceful civil disobedience.” He observes Jesus’ teaching by “aiding someone out of human compassion and not the need to be recognized [and by] putting others before [himself].”
Disconnect with church
It makes sense that Lane and other members of Generation Y would seek church. However, my friend distinctly identifies himself as a follower of Jesus, not a Christian. Like a couple can be in love without pursuing marriage, it is no longer a given that a Jesus follower affiliate with church.
In his book They Like Jesus but Not the Church (Zondervan, 2007), Dan Kimball explains that the emerging generation doesn’t always “equate the church with spirituality.” Much like the reason that some of us do not equate marriage with love.
Many of the emerging generation watch their parents frequent a steepled building, where hymns and prayers linger limp, as sighs in an empty house. The weary worship of their fathers and mothers echoes as dissonance to their children, who vow to escape this institutional wasteland.
Yet though church may appear desolate, we worship a God of resurrection.
The act of revival is to allow him to tend the soil of our lives, to draw us to himself and to pour his Living Water into our cracked marriages and arid churches. By allowing him to enter into our hearts, lives are replenished, churches are revitalized and his glory is revealed. Intimacy blooms from a land nourished by Jesus Christ.
This is the yadah for which Generation Y hunts. Let us prepare it to be found.
Zoe Miles
